The D-Day Memorial Turns 25, Virginia Tech's Record Gift, and a 175-Year-Old Mill Comes Back

Full Transcript

Intro

Alex: Welcome to The Roanoke Weekly. I’m Alex.

Morgan: And I’m Morgan. It’s Monday, June 8th, and here’s your week in the Star City.

Alex: Locally curated, AI-narrated. We pull from great local sources like the Roanoke Times, Cardinal News, WSLS, and WDBJ7, and we’d encourage you to support them.

This is a week that looks back a little, and ahead a lot.

Morgan: And the calendar is finally full again. Summer’s here. Let’s get into it.

The Lead: The National D-Day Memorial Turns 25

Alex: On Saturday, the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford marked two anniversaries at once. Eighty-two years to the day since the Normandy landings, and twenty-five years since the memorial itself opened, dedicated by President George W. Bush back in 2001.

Per the Roanoke Times, thousands turned out, many of them veterans, with a keynote from retired Army Major Drew Dix, a Medal of Honor recipient.

Morgan: And there was a moment in the ceremony that really stops you, wasn’t there.

Alex: There was. The memorial added fourteen names to its wall of the dead. Fourteen men who died on June 6th, 1944, but were never listed, because for decades their exact date of death was uncertain. The team finally confirmed it, and at the ceremony each name was read aloud as a Bedford County cadet laid a rose in the reflecting pool for every one.

Morgan: Fourteen families, getting that after eighty-two years.

Alex: And the reason it’s in Bedford comes down to hard local history. The Bedford Boys. This town lost more men per capita on D-Day than anywhere in America, which is why the national memorial sits here instead of in Washington.

The other backdrop is time. There are only a few dozen D-Day veterans still living, the youngest in their late nineties. As foundation board member, retired Major General Mari Eder, told the crowd, quote, “We must never forget. We always say thank you to our D-Day and our World War Two veterans.”

Morgan: That’s a good place to start the week.

Alex: It is.

The Rundown: News & Notes

Alex: All right, to the rest of the week.

First up, your electric bill. According to the Roanoke Times, Appalachian Power has asked Virginia regulators for a rate increase. If it goes through as filed, a typical home pays about nine dollars more a month, starting in the spring of 2027. The company calls it their smallest base-rate request in almost thirty years, crediting a 2025 state law that spreads some costs out. But the bottom line is still a higher bill.

Morgan: Right, and “smallest in thirty years” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Alex: It is. Rates have been a big political fight in southwest Virginia, so this kicks off a monthslong review at the State Corporation Commission. Last year they approved a lot less than the company asked for, so this number could still come down.

Morgan: Okay, my favorite one of the rundown. After about ten years of stops and starts, Virginia’s first onshore wind farm is actually going up. The Rocky Forge project, on North Mountain in Botetourt County. The turbines are being assembled right now, and they expect to make power later this year.

And the scale of these things, Alex. Thirteen turbines, each one taller than a sixty-story building, with blades nearly as long as a football field.

Alex: That’ll change the skyline up there.

Morgan: Completely. And it’s enough energy for more than twenty thousand homes, with up to twenty-five million dollars in tax revenue for the county over its life. Per WSLS, about a million dollars a year.

Alex: One wrinkle on how it finally got built, though. What unlocked it was a 2024 deal to sell the power to Botetourt’s new Google data center. The Sierra Club’s Dan Crawford told WSLS he worries about data centers and how much power they pull, but he admits that’s exactly what opened the door for our first wind farm.

Morgan: So the thing people worry about is what made the clean-energy project pencil out.

Quick one, and it’s a road a lot of you drive. Per the Roanoke Times, Orange Avenue between 11th and 22nd in northwest Roanoke gets repaved this summer, with the city piggybacking on water-line work that already tore up the pavement. But it’s more than a repave. They’re dropping one of the two westbound lanes for a center turn lane and adding crosswalks, on a stretch the city says has had more than its share of crashes.

Morgan: Anybody who drives Orange Avenue at rush hour just nodded.

And a fun one, from the Roanoke Times. Parkway Brewing, the Salem staple, is opening a second taproom downtown, in The Bower on Campbell Avenue. Last Thursday they craned the big fermenters in right through the storefront. They’re aiming to open early this summer, brewing on site, with its own specialty batches and food, house-made sausages, sandwiches, open for lunch daily.

Alex: Sausages at a brewery. That tracks.

Morgan: It more than tracks. Brewmaster Mike Pensinger’s line was great, quote, “I used to make beer as a hobby, and I don’t make beer as a hobby anymore.”

Alex: From the hobby to the day job. That’s the whole story of that brewery, honestly.

And to close out the rundown, a genuinely huge week for Virginia Tech, all at once. The headline: Tech announced the largest gift in its history, seventy-five million dollars, from an anonymous family of four-generation Hokies, most of it to athletics. It landed the same week the board stood up a new nonprofit, Hokie Ventures, basically a company built to chase athletics revenue.

Morgan: Which is where all of college sports is going. The money side is almost its own business now.

Alex: Right. And a leadership shake-up on top of the money. The board elected a new rector and vice rector, just a week after Governor Spanberger removed the previous rector, Roanoke lawyer John Rocovich, over ethics violations. Per Cardinal News, removing a sitting rector like that is rare, maybe unprecedented.

Morgan: And the part that’s about actual people, not boardrooms. The board approved four new dorms by the Duck Pond, twelve hundred beds. But to build them, they have to move a columbarium holding the remains of sixty-one people.

Alex: And the families fought it.

Morgan: They did. They went to court, a judge turned them down in May, and it’s moving ahead anyway. One widow called it, quote, a total sacrilege. A hard one, running right alongside the record gift.

Alex: Big week up there, all of it at once. That’s the news.

Let’s talk about the week ahead.

The Week Ahead: Events

Morgan: Okay, this is the week the summer calendar finally fills back up. And the easiest throughline this week is baseball. The RidgeYaks are home all week long, the whole stand against the Fayetteville Woodpeckers. Every night Tuesday through Saturday at 6:35, and then a Sunday matinee at 4:05 out at the ballpark in Salem.

Alex: A whole homestand. So you’ve got options if one night doesn’t work.

Morgan: Tons of options. And Tuesday night is Bark in the Park, so you can bring the dog to that one. Also Tuesday, if baseball’s not your thing, the Grandin’s running its Pride Month series. Tuesday night it’s the film Pariah, seven o’clock, and that one’s free.

Wednesday, there’s a fun music pick downtown. A band called TOAST, which is a tribute to Bread. So if soft rock is your lane, that’s your night.

Alex: No notes on a Bread tribute. That’s a real genre.

Morgan: It’s a vibe. Thursday is the big one, though. Party in Elmwood is back. That’s the Delta Dental summer concert series in Elmwood Park, downtown, 5:30 to 8:30. Beach music, cover bands, the whole crowd out on the lawn. It is basically the unofficial start of Roanoke summer.

Alex: That series always draws a good crowd.

Morgan: It does. Friday, something for the neighborhoods. The new Eureka Recreation Center in northwest Roanoke has its ribbon cutting, late morning, 11 to 1. Worth a look if you’re over that way, it’s a real community space reopening.

Alex: And the other big thing this week technically isn’t local at all. The World Cup starts Thursday. It’s here in North America this time, and the U.S. men’s team plays its first match Friday night, nine o’clock our time, against Paraguay.

Morgan: Oh, right. And you don’t have to drive to a host city to feel it. The Hotel Roanoke has set up an outdoor viewing spot in Peacock Alley they’re calling FIFA Alley. It’s a beer garden, screens inside and out, lawn games, and they’re showing matches all summer. So Friday night, if you want to watch the U.S. with a crowd, that’s right downtown.

Alex: A beer garden and the World Cup on a summer night. That works.

Morgan: And the weekend. Saturday, beyond the ballgame, there’s a nice family option. The SpongeBob Musical, the youth edition, has a two o’clock show. And then Sunday afternoon, this one’s lovely, Music on the Mountain up at the Mill Mountain Discovery Center, five to seven, free, outdoors, right by the star.

Alex: Hard to beat Mill Mountain on a summer evening.

Morgan: You really can’t. So if you only do one thing this week, I’d make it Party in Elmwood on Thursday. It’s free, it’s downtown, and it just feels like the kickoff to the season. But honestly, with the RidgeYaks home every single night, you could also just grab a ballgame and call it a perfect week.

The Closer: The Mill Comes Back

Alex: Let’s end in Elliston, with something coming back to life.

For 172 years, Big Spring Mill ground flour just off Route 460, in the Roanoke River valley. It was the kind of place your grandparents bought from, famous for a seasoned flour they called “A Number One.” And then, almost four years ago, in 2022, it closed. The longtime owner stepped away to spend time with family, and that seemed to be the end of a very long run.

It is not the end. Per WSLS and WDBJ7, new owners bought the mill at auction last year, one of them grew up right there in Elliston, and they are reopening it. Flour goes on sale again this month.

Morgan: And they didn’t modernize it into something else.

Alex: That’s the best part. They kept it exactly the same. Same equipment, same recipes, even the same wheat and corn from the same local farmers. They brought back the head miller, a guy with more than thirty years on the job. And there are two brothers who came back to hand-tie every single bag of flour, the way they always did. As the general manager pointed out, almost nothing on a grocery shelf is hand-tied anymore. That little knot is kind of the whole point.

Morgan: A 175-year-old mill, the same flour, tied by hand. I love that one.

Alex: One ninety-year-old in town summed it up. He just said, that’ll be nice. It’s been a while.

Close

Alex: That’s the week. Thanks for spending part of your Monday with us.

Morgan: If this was useful, share it with somebody else in the valley. We’re trying to make local news a little easier to keep up with.

Alex: I’m Alex.

Morgan: And I’m Morgan.

Alex: We’ll see you next Monday.